The Ephemeral Grand Center

                               Section 3, Iowa Township, Lincoln County, OK

Grand Center

Pop. 50 (1906)

1. Epitaph for an Unmarked Grave

In memory of

Celia Olson Pounds

daughter of Bertha Anderson Olson

born April 1872

in Hansingland, Sweden

married in Maysville Missouri

on September 26 1889

to George Benjamin Pounds

in 1891 delivered of a son named 

Thomas Franklin

in 1893

delivered of a son named Hans Allen

in 1894

delivered of a son named James William

in 1897

delivered of a daughter named 

Amanda Elizabeth

in 1898

delivered of twin girls named Early and Artie

in 1903

delivered of a son named John Anderson

in 1904

delivered of a son named Andrew Leland

on Tuesday March 20 1906 she returned
from Grand Center carrying a sack of feed

and was delivered of a stillborn daughter

on Friday three days later

she died in childbed

much lamented

2. Dewey Cemetery

spoken by Archie Pounds (1918-2004)

about 1992

Grandma, I never knew they put you here,

This swatch of pasture by the Guthrie road.

I should have guessed those cedars were for death,

But for all the years I drove these roads

I never knew there was a graveyard here.

Never asked about my grandma's grave?

My daddy growed up in this country,

He fiddled hoedowns 'round Carney and Merrick, 

But I growed up around Oak Grove.

It was my boy brought me out here today,

The August sun stuck low in the west,

The heat adhesive as a band-aid.

I beat the clump grass back with my cane,

But I didn't find your stone, Grandma.

I found Over, Swift, and Dwyer

Dewey, Dixon, Peebler, and Knight--

The monuments about a dozen,

The last dated 1907--

But I didn't find your name.  

And yet they put you here in the corner, 

And marked the plot with a stone.

Sandstone signals lives too frail for granite,

The frail and crumbly lives of farmers.

Now here's a stone:  David Kinder, 1810 to 1901.   

I knew some people by that name.

And here's the prayer they left for him:

rest father rest

the battle is over

the victory is wone

And your stone, Grandma?

I can tell what happened the same as I was here.

The rain beat the sandstone bare.

The crazy-making wind erased the words, 

Then mowers came, brush hogs broke the rock.

Some grandson piled the pieces in the fence.

Soil built up and suckers covered them,

Leavin you with post oak, blackjack, cedar,

Foxtails, cockleburs, and those milkweed flowers

That turn their battered faces to the sun.

And you, Grandma, dead at thirty-three,

Your dress now a suit of clinging clay

Down where it's black as Coley's butt.

Oak roots fiddle with your bones, 

Delvin like a husband's hand

Still lecherous in death,

Though the cradle of your pelvis

Broke in labor with the ninth.

White and brittle, the snapper clings 

To your side, no bigger than a rabbit.

It was not that the child could not thrive.

She was born with everything but the will--

That can be deformed just like a limb,

Or a woman old before her time.

Death smiled so gently on her,

Life could not get her attention.

From Sweden you came to a Missouri farm, 

And married a man with a limp, a love for cards,

And a gangrene gash in his foot from an ax.

Mama didn't like it when he stayed too long,

Said he got that leg 'cause he danced too much.

I looked in his suitcase once:  a nickel box of soda,

 A pitch deck, and Choice Reading for the Home

With a pledge to never drink or smoke, unsigned.

He lived to be seventy-nine, but you

Were thirty-three the raw March day you died.

Today we found the farm where you died

And your true stone there, the old front step 

Of your house--now filled with hay but still a house, 

Though off its foundation fifty feet away.

Inside the finishin boards said house, 

A nail wore a necklace of corn-binder gears.

Was it here death sewed his black seeds in your row?

You lie here half the globe away from home.  

Born in Sweden plump and golden, 

You died in Oklahoma white and thin.

I found your stone alright.  A quarried block 

Of limestone it'd take a team to move.

I beat the cockleburs back with my cane.

Worn by the wipin of your family's feet,

It told me plainer than any grave

Of the kitchen were you labored, of the feed 

They say you carried home in the full of your term, 

Of the corn-shuck pallet where you died.

The poor get no show when they die.

They bury you by the road, the cars scoot by 

And don't even see there's a graveyard here,

Or if they stop to look don't find your name.

It's a hell of a note, to live and die--

And my kids wonder why I sit and fret.

They don't know what trouble’s like.